How Well Does the American Constitution Work? (Other (Not Listed) Sample)

American Constitution
Name
Professor
Institution
Course
Date

Introduction
The United States Constitution has played its role to a great impact in the several years and continues to do so up to date, regardless of having been written several hundred years ago. To meet this particular purpose of having an efficient Constitution requires having it drafted in such a way, its roles are vividly defined for governing a country and should have the elasticity to develop to meet new challenges and international transformations without having its founding principle changed in the progress.
Nevertheless in today's' contemporary society, there are elements of the Constitution that some individuals highly believe are not completely fit in terms of dealing with new challenges facing the United States today, that may have not been considered in the past but now have become topics that must be dealt with. The United States currently is one of the world's most powerful as well as respected nations of the modern society is no longer an adolescent entity attempting to find its way in the world, but has grown over time into a sophisticated nation, whose economy is beyond comparison and is known as "the land of opportunity". It is vividly clear that a nation of such magnitude and size could have only been an aspiration at the time of the founding fathers. At the time at which the Constitution was drafted, the main issue was to run away from the European system of government at that time.
The Democratic norms in the United States
 There has been an historical view of the American democratic tradition with analytical overtones showing how democracy has transformed over the course of American history. The United States is a democracy. There is no doubt of that, but the American democratic tradition is largely something of a myth. 
 First, a few clarification; the definition of democracy is as majority rule and minority rights. Of these the second is more significant than the first. There are several despotisms which have majority rule. Hitler held plebiscites in which he obtained over 92 percent of the vote, and most of the people who were qualified to vote did vote. I think that in China today a majority of the people supports the government, but China is certainly not a democracy. The essential half of this definition then, is the second half, minority rights. What that means is that a minority has those rights which enable it to work within the system and to build itself up to be a majority and replace the governing majority. Moderate deviations from majority rule do not usually undermine democracy. In fact, absolute democracy does not really exist at the nation-state level. For example, a modest poll tax as a qualification for voting would be an infringement on the principle of majority rule but restrictions on the suffrage would have to go pretty far before they really abrogated democracy(Bessette& Pitney, 2011).
Another basic point, democracy is not the highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic tradition might lead one to think this is the most perfect political system ever devised. That just is not true. There are other political values which are more important and urgent, security, for instance. And one would suggest that political stability and political responsibility are also more important.  In deed, one would define a good government as a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority because those in power had the authority to rule and the political system reflected that situation by giving governing power to the elite, then, it seems to me, we would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.  Now there are several features of democracy that many individuals really do not know about. It is said, for instance, that government officials are elected by the voters, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. I would think this is misleading. The outcome of an election is not determined by those who vote, but by those who do not vote. Since 1945 or so, The United States has had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the population voting. In the 1968 election almost 80 million voted, and almost 50 million citizens qualified to vote did not.
The outcome was determined by the 50 million who did not vote. If one could have got 2 percent of the non-voters to the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that has been true of most of our recent elections. It's the ones who don't vote who determine the outcome (Hamilton, Madison & Jay, 2013).  Something else we tend to overlook is that the nomination process is much more important than the election process. I startle a lot of my colleagues who think they know England pretty well by asking them how candidates for election are nominated in England. They don't have conventions or primary elections. So the important thing is who names the candidates. In any democratic country, if you could name the candidates of all parties, you wouldn't care who voted or how, because your man would be elected. So the nominations are more important than the elections. 
In the book “Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson”. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power functions is in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnson's experience from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out.
And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term, the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate's hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the "unchangeable" Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control(Strunk, 2006).
Caro demonstrates how Johnson's political genius enabled him to reconcile the irreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust or at least the cooperation of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson's ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds.
And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson's amazi...